Best Mummy Ever
by Leuny
Summary: Or: Can I Have Some Cake, Please? Well, who hasn't ever played with toilet paper when they were young? Young Kaito wants to find the perfect Halloween costume to wear for going trick or treating and finds trouble along the way... I do know that Halloween is, oh, five months away, but this plot bunny wanted to be written and published NOW. Who am I to disagree? ; ) Oneshot.


**Best. Mummy. Ever.**

**Disclaimer**: Don't own either DC or MK. The plotbunnies are mine, though. I'm afraid they've had too much sugar lately…

**AN:** Best. Mummy. Ever. …Or: Can I have some cake, please?

Haven't you ever played with toilet paper when you were young? ;_)

I do know that Halloween is, oh, five months away? But this plotbunny wanted to be written and given to my sister as a belated present, so here it is. Have fun reading!

_BestMummyEver_

Kaito was happy. He'd been going to school for little more than a month now and loved it. School was fun! Especially, since Aoko, his best friend, was in the same class as he was! Life was good. But better things had yet to come, he felt. The small boy was excited. For, within less than a week, there was a holiday to be celebrated that he'd been a fan of for longer than he could remember. Yes, his parents had started early to install a particular fondness for an English holiday in the young boy. Namely, Halloween was next week.

It appeared that every year Halloween held something new in store for the boy and he was already looking forward to it! The year before, he'd celebrated Halloween together with his parents, but seeing as his father had had a show that day, as was custom he'd celebrated Halloween with his parents during the day and then been sent off to go trick and treating with Aoko and her father. The children had been a sight to behold: their costumes had been extremely colourful (his was, at least) and exceptional, and Kaito was very proud of what he'd managed to put together that year. This year the boy thought he wanted to wear something even more extraordinary!

Oh, how the boy loved Halloween! With two disguise artists in the family, was it such a small wonder, really? The grin that stretched over his face at the thought of what he would like to disguise as this year almost showed fangs. But he didn't want to scare off Aoko, so he kept the grin small. On a certain scale, naturally, seeing as the girl was still a tad suspicious about what her friend was planning now. Usually, such a grin was followed by a prank or some other adventure that she hadn't yet failed to be dragged into. Being around the other boy was fun, sure, but she'd learned almost from the start of their friendship that his ideas could sometimes be a tad… crazy, to say the least.

More often than not, the young girl found herself acting as a sort-of mediator to get the boy to agree to toning his plans down a little, so that no one would be too outraged at what he did. She'd kind of slipped into the role, finding herself to be a natural talent at that. It was probably due to her parents' influence, but what did she know? The only thing that Aoko could be sure of was that that kind of grin on Kaito's face meant trouble. And she was already curious about what plan he'd concocted this time. Well, nothing better to do than to ask the troublemaker, right?

_BestMummyEver_

A day before Halloween, the young boy's expression was downcast as he sat in the living room of his home, reflecting about the things he'd seen. He was feeling grumpy. It seemed as though everybody in the whole world had known about his plans and decided to take his plans as their own and go with different versions of the costume that he'd had in mind all week. So far, Aoko and he had heard four people from his class loudly boasting about their costumes and about them making preparations to wear what _he'd_ originally wanted to go as. And it wasn't even the day of Halloween yet!

It had been _his_ idea in the first place! Why did the whole world take it as theirs all of a sudden? He'd need to rethink his options and choose a different costume. But within a day, would that be enough time to find one that he'd like? His eyebrows crinkled together in worry. What could he go as? What could he wear?

Kaito didn't know all that much about Halloween itself, other than that it was a tradition to go out in costumes and wear outrageous things to make other people give you sweets. That was the fun part. So, all he had to do was make people give him sweets because of his costume, right? They should come to appreciate what he'd come as, thus the giving him chocolate bit. Ooooh, chocolate!

A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, lifting his mood with them. Well, if he wanted people to give him sweets, then he should probably make them think of the right things to give to begin with, shouldn't he? An idea for a possible costume had entered his head. It was one of those ideas that didn't let go of you unless you tried them out. Outright grinning by then, the little boy jumped up from his lying position on the couch and was on his way out the living room and upstairs, where his mother had been in the middle of cleaning up. He had an important question to ask.

_BestMummyEver_

It was the day of Halloween – a favourite holiday for both her and her husband every year – and the two of them were in the kitchen. Her husband was drinking a glass of juice while reading the newspaper and she was tidying up the kitchen a bit. She'd been planning on making a cake for the occasion, but the flour had conspicuously been absent from the kitchen, so she'd resorted to cleaning while keeping her husband company. The day had been a relaxing one, her husband for once didn't have any shows planned on that evening and the show that he'd held that morning had gone well. Things were good and they were quite content.

That was the scene that greeted their son as he came into the kitchen, his friend Aoko tagging along. Really, it had been a relief that he'd found the little girl this soon after moving there. His parents could already see that the two were becoming friends for life. The boy was fidgeting and looking down, as though trying to come up with a good formulation for what he wanted to say. With a smile, she paused in her activity to ask the little boy, "What is it?"

At her question, her husband turned around slightly, as well, to regard the two for a brief moment, before he went back to reading the newspaper. The young boy was clearly getting nervous by then, gnawing at his lower lip and looking at her with a worried frown on his face. His mother raised an amused eyebrow. She didn't know her son to be this quiet. Usually, that preceded trouble. Seeing as he was standing right in front of her, however, she doubted that he was planning anything. Was it something he'd done, then? Well, she wouldn't know if he didn't say anything. The silence drew out for longer than necessary, so she left her place behind the kitchen counter, went over to the two children and crouched down to their level.

"What is it, Kaito-kun? Did something happen?" He shook his head, then he hesitated. Oh, so something did happen. Or was he not sure? She blinked in bemusement. That behaviour was puzzling. Her husband had turned around, too. Shortly, they made eye contact – he didn't know what was going on either – before her head swivelled back to the boy. It was confusing, to say the least. Aoko didn't seem to know how to phrase what was plaguing her child, either, sporting the same half-guilty, half-worried expression.

"I…" he started, then cut himself off. He started anew, "I… just wanted to ask… if we could have a bit of whipped cream to eat? Please?" Puppy dog eyes coming from both of the young children in front of them greeted her and her husband once he was finished, although Aoko didn't quite seem to know exactly where the whipped cream would feature in her friend's plans. The little girl looked a tad confused. The junior magician's mother found that her eyebrows rose to disappear behind her bangs. Was that all there was to the strange behaviour? Tilting her head to the right in contemplation, she nodded.

"Yes, of course you can have some whipped cream. But we don't have any sugar pearls or anything to deco-" she was cut off by her boy's insistent shaking of the head. Blinking bemusedly, she looked on calmly as he stopped the shaking and determinedly told her,

"No, we don't need any of those! Can we just have the whipped cream, please?" What an odd request. She was curious about what he planned on doing with said cream, but for the moment she managed to stave off her curiosity and go over to the fridge to pull out the whipped cream spray.

With a slightly hesitant warning, she handed it to her apparently eager boy, telling him one more time to be careful with it and not eat too much of the whipped cream all at once. With a nod and a long-suffering rolling of the eyes, he assured her that, "Yes, Okaa-san, I knooow!" before promptly breaking into a run and dashing off into the living room, Aoko trailing after him in a more sedate pace and closing the door behind them.

Chikage knew that the child had been well aware of those warnings already, but she couldn't help but feel a bit apprehensive about just what he'd had in mind when he'd made that odd request. She glanced to her right hand side only to see her husband pulling up her shoulders once before letting them fall in an obvious statement: he didn't know what that had been all about, either. Super, no great help was to be found there, then.

Ah, well. As long as the boy used plates and ate the whipped cream in a relatively civilised manner, she couldn't complain. It was a holiday, after all, and whipped cream alone shouldn't give him that much of a sugar rush before they went trick and treating together. All was suspiciously quiet for all of five minutes.

Then a few crashes could be heard, though they were muffled through the door. What were the children up to now? Her husband glanced up at her and the same thought was mirrored in his eyes that was going through her head right then: The only thing that the two of them could do to satiate their curiosity was to go into the living room and see for themselves what the children were up to on this favourite holiday of theirs.

So her husband swiftly folded that newspaper of his and they made their way into the living room to try and figure out this latest mystery. What the adults of the house were presented with when they opened the door to said living room was, however, not at all what they'd expected.

Well, to say that they'd been expecting anything at all would have been an overstatement of facts – they'd presumed that whatever their son was up to might involve whipped cream, possibly the eating thereof and maybe even plates of some sort, if they were lucky and the children had thought to use the ones from the lower cupboard of the room (it wasn't as though those could only be found in the kitchen).

The picture that greeted them involved whipped cream, so they'd been correct to some extent, at least. It also involved white drapes, linen sheets, towels and toilet paper loosely covering every available surface within a two-meter-radius around the children. Everything was white, almost eerily so. The whole ensemble reminded the two of them of a ghost play they'd seen once, though neither of them could remember the name. That one had included a lot of white blinding them, as well.

To regain their senses, they turned on the spot on the threshold of the living room door, and blinked at the fairly normal scene of the abandoned kitchen, before closing their eyes in tandem and counting to seven. Next they reopened them and simultaneously turned around once more. No, nothing had changed. If anything, Chikage finally knew where her flour had disappeared to: it was spread generously across several of the couches' surfaces and a little bit of it could be found on her boy's face and head where the whipped cream spray had been used to give the boy even whiter hair.

He'd changed into a white shirt, too. Did he want to go as a ghost this year? She'd thought he'd wanted to do something special for this year because he'd already seen so many of those? Hadn't he complained to her night a day ago that a lot of his friends at school went as ghosts and he hadn't wanted to look like he was imitating others? In the end it was her husband who found his voice first and broke the sudden silence that had befallen the room as the young ones noticed the adults standing stock-still in the entrance to the living room.

"What, pray tell, are you doing?" it was carefully phrased, not giving away any of his thoughts as of yet. Hers, in the meantime, were swirling around in her brain as if there was no tomorrow. Hows and whens and whys chased one another in a merry attempt at reconciling the image that was oh-so-helpfully provided by her eyes with the image she had in her head of what her living room usually looked like.

Aoko answered when their boy didn't seem to find the right words to say, "We were disguising ourselves. My costume is easy, so we're working on Kaito's right now." The little girl pointed towards the door that led from the living room into the corridor on the couple's left hand side, where presumably her costume resided, in the relative safety of its absence from the living room. "Kaito wanted to do something special, so…" The girl trailed off, seemingly unsure of how to go on now that she'd started the explanation. She threw the boy a look.

"I want to go as a cake!" The boy, it appeared, couldn't hold it in any longer. His parents blinked at him confusedly. A cake? Aoko was frowning at him, while the two grown-ups were working through what he'd said. It didn't entirely make sense to them. The gears were turning in their heads, but question must have showed in their faces, for the boy was quick to explain his reasoning to them, nodding in confirmation all the while,

"Yes! Because, you know, people give out sweets to children who come in disguise, right?" His parents decided a hesitant nod was in order as the boy waited for them to do _something_ to make him go on other than stare at him. "Well, if the people I visit know that I like cake, they'll be sure to give me cake, right? And because I don't want to have to tell everybody that, I wanted to show them!"

Which equated, at least to his mind, going disguised as a cake for Halloween. That was the only logical conclusion one could come to, right?

The burst of laughter coming from his father certainly couldn't be helped. Neither could the suspicious trembling of his mother's lips or her muffled guffaws once she'd left the room and closed the door. Surely Kaito would understand, later on, when he was older, just why his mother had found that exact moment – right before she'd left the living room momentarily for a saner room of the house to get rid of those ever-so-irritating stomach cramps that seemed to plague her for a decidedly short amount of time – to be the best for taking a photo, as well. Nicely enough, the camera had been positioned right on the cupboard beside the kitchen door leading into the living room as if someone had known she'd need it.

Really, everything had a quite reasonable explanation, in the grand scheme of things.

_BestMummyEver_

Later, when his father had calmed down a little and his mother had managed to come into the living room without breaking out into laughter immediately upon entering it, the two children had actually managed to get some valuable advice from the disguise experts residing in the magician's house. The toilet paper that had earlier on obviously been discarded and thrown onto a pile of things-that-didn't-work was pulled back out and, in combination with cardboard paper that had been turned white in mid-air by the famous magician's hands to the amazement of the youngest in their midst, the four of them got together an exceedingly passable version of a wearable cake costume for Kaito, decorations and all.

Nevertheless, the biggest surprise for the two kids came when they prepared to leave the Kuroba household and, after having put on their shoes, looked up only to find Kaito's parents in matching white costumes, waiting for them. Chikage was wearing what appeared to be toilet paper wrapped all around her – only just leaving room for her eyes and mouth and nose – and Tôichi was currently wearing a white linen sheet around his shoulders, masquerading as a ghost, himself.

Tôichi had a hand around his wife's waist and was asking for Kaito's opinion on their costumes, while the little boy was having difficulty to stop staring at the two of them. Having gotten his jaw off the floor, the little boy replied tentatively,

"You're coming with us? You're going to do the trick and treating too this year?" Twin nods followed those questions, fond smiles spread on both the adults' faces. In all the excitement for his own costume he hadn't thought about who would accompany the two of them in the least. Aoko was staring at the three of them in confusion.

"But Otousan said he'd come with us!" she threw in as a comment, her brows furrowing together as she was trying to make sense of what she'd been told.

Chikage broke away from the half-embrace to come closer to the two children and crouch down before Aoko, "Yes." Her smile formed into a grin, "You see, we're going to go together. All of us."

The surprise that changed into growing delight with which the children regarded the two adults was gratification enough. That Halloween would be one of those that they'd remember for years to come.

And if their boy had a little too much fun afterwards, when he was helping his father unwrap his mother as though she was a birthday present, it could only be seen as a bonus. And if, long after the boy had gone to sleep, his father decided to see for himself how many more of his wife's clothes he could unwrap or just how much of his wife he could cover with that delicious cream while still taking his time and not waking the boy, well, that was a different story entirely.

_BestMummyEver_

**AN**: I know she won't read it anytime in the near future, but this fanfiction is dedicated to my sister – who is a first-time-mum and obviously very good at it, too.

Part of the story line would/should have been this sentence, but I couldn't figure out how to put it into the story – Aoko's POV isn't used at all in this oneshot, so make of this whatever you like, dear readers:

_Aoko is certain there is something wrong about Kaito's decision to go as cake, but she can't seem to figure out just what it is…_

Personally, I'm not quite satisfied with the general flow of this story, but I hope it's okay to follow despite my misgivings… exactly _how_ did that ending come into existence anyways, I wonder?

In any case, I hope you enjoyed my little oneshot!

Cheers,

Leuny.


End file.
